Postcolonial Ecologies

Literatures of the Environment

Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley

Description

The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry.
With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.

Postcolonial Ecologies

Literatures of the Environment

Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley

Author Information

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures and a coeditor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture.

George B. Handley, Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University, is the author of Postslavery Literatures of the Americas and New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott.

Contributors:

ContributorsLeGrace Benson holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a M.F.A. from the University of Georgia. Currently she is Director of the Arts of Haiti Research Project, Associate Editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies, and a member of the Board of the Haitian Studies Association.Author of a number of articles in scholarly journals, she has also contributed chapters to books concerning educational, environmental, and arts issues in Haiti and the wider Caribbean. She held a Cornell University Civic Fellowship in 2003-2004 and was Visiting Researcher in the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005-2006. Benson has taught the history of art at Cornell and Wells College and has served as Associate Dean at
Wells and Empire State College of the State University of New York, where she directed the program in Arts, Humanities and Communications. Her current book, How the Sun Illuminates Under Cover of Darkness, examines the works of Haitian artists in light of the unique environment, history, and religions of Haiti from the Taíno-Columbian encounter through the present era (Ian Randle Publishers, 2010).

Byron Caminero-Santangelo is an associate professor at the University of Kansas. He is the author of African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (SUNY Press, 2005), as well as numerous articles on African fiction, twentieth-century British fiction, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism. Recent articles include: "Different Shades of Green: Ecocriticism and
African Literature," African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Blackwell, 2007); "Of Freedom and Oil: Nation, Globalization, and Civil Liberties in the Writing of Ken Saro-Wiwa," Research in English and American Literature (2006).

Anthony Carrigan is Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. He is completing a monograph on postcolonial island tourism and has published widely in the postcolonial field on topics such as tourism, ecology, sustainability, and indigeneity. His work has appeared in a number of special issues on postcolonial ecocriticism, including the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and his next research project explores postcolonial literature and disaster from an
ecocritical perspective.

Allison Carruth is an Assistant Professor of English and participating faculty member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She has published essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, and Modernism /Modernity and is currently researching the ethics of genetic engineering in contemporary literature, art and architecture. Her current book manuscript--"Global Appetites"--traces the relationship between food and globalization in U.S. and Anglophone literature from 1918 to the present.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (University of Hawai`i Press, 2007) and co-editor,
with Renée Gosson and George Handley, of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2005). She is co-editor, with Cara Cilano, of a special issue of Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment on postcolonial ecocriticism (2007) and currently completing a manuscript about environmental globalization in the postcolonial tropics.

Jill Didur is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (University ofToronto Press, 2006). Her research interests include secular discourse and contemporary South Asian literature and culture as well as posthuman theory. She is currently working on a
SSHRC-sponsored research project that explores how posthumanist theory might enable readings of postcolonial writing on animals and the environment, particularly in postcolonial literatures of plant-collecting and gardening.

Dina El Dessouky is A.B.D. in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, currently working on her dissertation, "Indigenous Articulations of Identity and Island Space in Kanaka Maoli and Ma'ohi Literature of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Era." Her dissertation focuses on how indigenous Hawaiians and French Polynesians shape new identities in relation to recent colonial uses of their land and sea territories as zones for nuclear and military weapons testing and tourism. She hopes to encourage the growth of Pacific Island Studies on the
continental United States, and promotes this goal through her course offerings as a lecturer and as event coordinator of the Pacific Islands Research Cluster at UCSC.

George Handley is College Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University. Author of Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (Virginia 2000) and most recently, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Georgia 2007), he is also the co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (Virginia 2006) with Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Renée Gosson. An inaugural member of the Executive Board and Program Chair for the International American Studies Association, his articles have appeared in Callaloo, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, ISLE, and others.

Pablo Mukherjee grew up and was educated in Calcutta, Oxford and Cambridge. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University. He is the author of Crime and Empire (Oxford UP, 2003) and Postcolonial Environments (Palgrave 2010), as well as articles on colonial and postcolonial literatures and cultures and Victorian Studies. While putting the finishing touches to his book on contemporary Indian environmental issues and the novel in English, he has just started researching and publishing on two new areas - Victorian natural disasters and Victorian world literary systems. He has also reviewed films, theatre and visual arts for national media in the UK.

Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English and
Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood. South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador).Dreambirds was selected as a Notable Book of 2000 by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the ten best books of the year by Esquire. It was also serialized as the Book of the Week on BBC radio. His book Slow Violence and Environmental Time is forthcoming from Harvard University Press and he is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian,
Outside, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Ariel, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Program in Africana Studies at Vassar College, where she holds the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She is also a participating faculty member in the Programs in American Culture, Latin American Studies, and Environmental Studies. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico and an M.A., an M.Phil., and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. She is the author of a number of books, among them PhyllisShand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos), and most recently, Literatures of the Caribbean (2008). Her biography of Cuban patriot José Martí (José Martí: A Life) will be published in 2009. Her most recently completed book project, Endangered Species: Ecology and the Discourse of the Caribbean Nation, has just been submitted for publication. She is at work on Glimpses of Hell, a study of the aftermath of the 1902 eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano of Martinique, and on Painting the Caribbean (1865-1898): Frederic Church, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, and Winslow Homer.

Elaine Savory is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at The New School University, New
York City. She co-edited Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, and has written flame tree time (poems), Jean Rhys and The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. She has also published widely on Caribbean and African literature, especially on poetry, drama and theater, women's writing and literary history. She is presently completing The Quarrel with Death: Elegiac Poetry in the Shadow of Empire, and editing the MLA Teaching Approaches to the Work of Kamau Brathwaite.

Jonathan Steinwand is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. His courses include global literature, Pacific Islands Literatures, literary criticism, and British literature from Paradise Lost to Frankenstein. His publications include "How a Local Work Can Make Core Questions
Hit Home: Winona LaDuke's Last Standing Woman" in The Wider World of Core Texts and Courses and "The Future of Nostalgia in Friedrich Schlegel's Gender Theory: Casting Aesthetics beyond Ancient Greece and Modern Europe toward a Future Germany"in Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism. He is currently working on The Survivance of Enchantment in the Secularizing Encounter: From the Gothic to the Postcolonial, a study tracing the enchanted countermemory that persists from the Gothic to the Postcolonial in spite of the hegemonic forces of disenchantment that drive secular modernity.

Jennifer Wenzel is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Previous publications include "Petro-Magic-Realism: A Political
Ecology of Nigerian Literature" (Postcolonial Studies), "The Pastoral Promise and the Political Imperative: The Plaasroman Tradition in an Era of Land Reform" (Modern Fiction Studies), and "Epic Struggles over India's Forests in Mahasweta Devi's Short Fiction" (Alif). The author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anti-colonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (University of Chicago Press and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), she is currently at work on a book project entitled "Reading for the Planet: World Literature and Environmental Crisis."

Postcolonial Ecologies

Literatures of the Environment

Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley

Reviews and Awards

"[An] impressive achievement." --American Book Review

"The body of works under consideration in these essays is capacious and diverse...But in its best moments, this collection also engages with physical (contested) spaces and historical trends and events, revealing the social and geographic conditions for the production of literature and literary culture...An essential critique." --Small Axe

"This is a cutting edge work that not only situates ecology and biopolitics firmly at the center of postcolonial studies, but also shows the importance of postcolonial literatures to global debates on climate change and environmental degradation. A superb collection!" --Bill Ashcroft, author of Caliban's Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures

"Postcolonial Ecologies, with its outstanding roster of contributors, is a crucial intervention in the internationalisation of ecocriticism and the greening of postcolonialism. Framed by DeLoughrey and Handley's well-informed and lucid introduction, this diverse and formidable collection clarifies the inseparability of environmental issues from neo-colonial relations." --Greg Garrard, author of Ecocriticism

"By now, postcolonialists know that empire ruined landscapes and distorted human connections to nature. This book asks how writers try to undo the thinking that underpinned it all and how critics can point towards something more than reactive protest od misguided celebrations of organic links between the folk and nature...the book succeeds in directing us to some answers." --Journal of Postcolonial Writing

"An important landmark in the expanding field of postcolonial ecocriticism...this collection makes a vital contribution to postcolonial ecocriticism, negotiating crucial debates in the field and generating new categories of analysis that should enliven both postcolonial
and ecocritical studies." --Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"A powerful collection of original work that adds to established discussions within ecocritical discourse and pushes postcolonial and ecocritical scholarship toward new topics of crucial importance to global environmental awareness and response. It offers a smart, diverse, and rich contemplation of the role of postcolonial literatures within a global
environmental imagination and politics and clearly points to the possibility of dialogue between ecocritical thought and postcolonial writing. Better yet, it does this while maintaining a wide generic, geographic, theoretical, and historical scope. This book no doubt will make a welcome addition to the shelves of many literary and environmental scholars." --Comparative Literature Studies